With all the summer distractions, it's hard to keep focused on the news feeds. So, let I Programmer do it for you and simply consult our weekly digest of news, book reviews and articles to keep you up to speed. This one covers July 23-30.

News

Registration has opened for a new contest in which devs are challenged to design perceptual computing apps for Intel's RealSense platform. All you have to do at this stage is submit an idea to be in with a chance to receive a developer kit to take it further.

The only real problem with tracking.js is that potential users might ignore it, thinking it has something to do with marketing. It doesn't. It is an open source computer vision library in JavaScript and it makes it fairly easy to add sophisticated image processing into your web apps.

UPDATED If the current version of PHP is 5.x, what should the next version be called? Obviously it should be 6.x. Why then is there a proposal that it should be 7.x? And as PHPng gets ever faster, is it PHP 5.7, PHP 6.0 PHP 7.0 or even PHP 8.0?

There is currently a lot of fuss going on about an additional method of fingerprinting browsers to track users as they move from one website to another. The technology is very simple but the real question is - how can it work well enough to be useful?

A website called I Know Where your Cat Lives uses the latitude and longitude metadata from photos of cats posted websites like Flickr to place the photos on Google maps with remarkable accuracy. Should we find this alarming?

A 14-day Marathon Match with $15,000 in prizes at stake starts today. Join other competitors to devise algorithms to help NASA track asteroids that would cause cataclysmic devastation were they to impact Earth.

The UK Government has selected ODF (Open Document Format) as a required standard for sharing and collaborating on documents across all governement bodies. PDF/A and HTML are the selected standards for viewing government documents.

It seems almost silly to lead a story about the next version of Visual Studio with the fact that it might have dropped the ALL CAPS menu items, but it is an indication that the team is trying to fix VS and turn it into the IDE we all loved.

Professional Programmer

Don't dismiss the spreadsheet. It not only brought programming to the masses but was an early entry into rapid application development, functional programming and an easy and natural approach to parallel programming, reactive programming and cellular automata.